krainaksiazek french economy and the state 20107039

Over the past two decades, many welfare states have experienced a combination of low economic growth and rising unemployment, concurrent with increasing pension and health care obligations, which has exacerbated government budget deficits. Some analysts forecast that for a number of welfare states these problems will worsen in the future. Their fiscal problems, in particular, present welfare state policy makers with the dilemma of attempting to fund redistribution schemes consistent with the ideal of a secure egalitarian society while at the same time remaining competitive in a 'new economy' that places a premium on competition, innovation, and flexible labour and product markets.
Thus, an important issue has emerged: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

Canada and Ukraine probably differ more than they are alike: location, size, culture, politics, economy, history, society, language. Well, oddly enough, the countries appear rather similar than different when it comes to the last three aspects if viewed through the prism of the language issue. Having provided theoretical, historical background to the language issue in both countries and proven their comparability, this paper analyzes the official language policies in Canada and Ukraine since the Quiet Revolution in Québec and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, traces the development of de jure, as in the case of Canada, and de facto, as in the case of Ukraine, bilingualism. The paper goes on to study the state of the language rights the peoples of Canada and Ukraine enjoy in their daily lives, the level of satisfaction with their protection of the respective linguistic communities. Having no official statistics on origin and number of complaints against the alleged violations of language rights in Ukraine at its disposal, the paper resorts to the analysis of the relevant court decisions, ultimately answering the question why Ukrainian is not English or Russian is not French.

By the 11th century the French King had lost control of border regions, while local warfare had grown alarmingly frequent. In fact the energies of the French military elite were now focused on petty internal squabbles and external adventures like the Norman conquest of England. Nevertheless, the population and economy both expanded, although it was not until the 12th century that the crown rebuilt its power-base. Despite its slow start when compared with neighbours like England, the Kingdom of France had, by the 13th century, risen to become the most powerful state in Western Europe. This title describes the organisation, history and tactics of French medieval armies.

The Mitterrand years saw the transformation of business and its relationship to government. From State to Market, first published in 1996, details the governmental policies toward business that went from nationalization to privatization, deregulation, and ever-increasing European integration, bringing with them the move from a dirigiste, or state-directed, economy to a more market-oriented one. Professor Schmidt profiles the players, the interpenetrating elite of top business and government officials who share common state educational history and career track and who, as the beneficiaries of the all-pervasive culture of the state, have managed not only to maintain their hold in the ministries but also to colonize industry. This book, which spans the fields of public policy and political economy, contains both empirical information - the results of over forty interviews with top business and government officials - and a theoretical framework that sets French state-society relations in comparative perspective.

The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war.--from The Archeology of ViolenceAnthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication in French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres's final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he had begun before his death in 1977 at the age of 43. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Lvi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other Western interpretive models of "primitive societies."
Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segmentation and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs--who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they represent--the "savages" Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization."The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and shamanism to "primitive" power and economy, and are as vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition--which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viverios de Castro--holds even more relevance for readers in today's an era of malaise and globalization.

Capitalism was born in England, yet the dominant Western conceptions of modernity come from elsewhere, notably from France, the historical model of 'bourgeois' society. In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a 'modern' state and political culture in continental Europe, signalled the persistence of precapitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a 'modern' state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe. Weaving together economic and political history with the history of ideas, Wood ranges across a broad spectrum of current debates, from the 'Nairn-Anderson these' to the contributions of J.C.D.
Clark and Alan Macfarlane, and over a wide variety of topics: the development of British capitalism and French absolutism; the state, the nation and their symbolic representations; revolution and tradition; the cultural patterns of English speech; urbanism, ruralism and the landscape garden; ideas of sovereignty, democracy, property and progress. This book will be as interesting and provocative to observers of contemporary capitalism as to historians of early modern Europe or Western political thought.

For two hundred years historians have viewed England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution - bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view. By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England's revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688-1689. James II developed a modernization programme that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state.
The post-revolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution - not the French Revolution - the first truly modern revolution. This wide-ranging book reenvisions the nature of the Glorious Revolution and of revolutions in general, the causes and consequences of commercialization, the nature of liberalism, and ultimately the origins and contours of modernity itself.

Alain de Botton, best-selling author of How Proust can Change Your Life, has set six of the finest minds in the history of philosophy to work on the problems of everyday life. Here then are Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on some of the things that bother us all; lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform.

Combining a chronological overview with topical development, this team of esteemed authors presents in engaging detail the rich and varied history of Missouri, a state that has played a pivotal role in the nation's history from the pre-Columbian period to the present. In a clear engaging style that all students of Missouri history are certain to enjoy, the authors explore such subjects as Missouri's Indian peoples, French and Spanish settlement, slavery, the American Civil War and Reconstruction, politics from territorial days to the present, cultural and industrial development, both world wars, historical and recent demographics, and the difficult choices that Missourians face regarding the economy, the environment, and education as the 21st century unfolds. Featuring an entirely new chapter as well as new maps, photographs, newly revised Suggestions for Further Reading, and a comprehensive index, this latest edition of our popular survey text will continue to enlighten and engage all those who call Missouri home.

For many Westerners, the 1990s may seem the era of Islamic fundamentalism with radical Muslims everywhere on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of contemporary politics. Offering a corrective to such a view, the French political philosopher Olivier Roy depicts an entirely different spectacle - political Islam is a failure. Save for Iran, it has not won power in the states of the Muslim world. He asserts that despite its incantation about an "Islamic way", with a specifically Islamic economy and Islamic state, the realities of the Muslim world remain fundamentally unchanged. This text argues that the political regimes of the 1990s are no different from those of the last decade; and the Islamism of the 1980s is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s, that is, populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich, and subsidies for the poor. Roy asserts that the "reds" of yesterday are the Muslim "greens" of today, and there is little prospect that the newcomers will succeed where their predecessors failed. This argument reassesses radical Islam and the set of ideas and assumptions at its core.